Very interesting! My grandma had Alzheimers, and I would love to see a cure for it in my time....

RIP Grandma!

Interesting. The last sentence is most important:"You want something as selective as possible, and as safe as possible," she says.

A pan-HDAC inhibitor is highly risky as histone hyperdecondensation has been linked to cancer. That's not surprising ofc.

The key in the ensuing drug discovery exercise here will be undoubtedly specificity of inhibition. That is assuming that HDAC2 is not critical for other phyiological processes. Generating a specific drug is a high bar, but with much prospect.

I like this news.


/edit: An HDAC1 knockout phenotype is embryonic lethal. An HDAC2, HDAC5 or HDAC9 knockout phenotype is cardiac defect in each case. As they say "the poison is in the dose." Not only HDAC2 specificity will be important, but dosage as well. As I said, it is a high-bar endeavor to generate the right drug for HDAC2 hyperactivity-based Alzeimer disease.

This post was edited by Dmon_Hunter on Apr 11 2012 12:23pm

Sounds like if anything this drug is going to be like playing with fire

If they can control the fire, then they should be all set. It may not be trivial to do..

hope so, my grandma has this awful disease :/

I'm really sorry to hear..

strongest protective factor against alzheimer's are anabolic steroids.

Check out the neuroscience of testosterone.
It's one of the most efficient components involved in the removal of beta amyloid plagues.

So far all scientific studies I've read, testosterone or DHT replacement therapy has always cut the amount of beta amyloid in about half.




Doing regular sport, especially exhausting exercises that boost your hormones, eating healthy to avoid diabetis 2, not having an ApoE4 gene, not drinking excessive alcohol and perhaps TRT would lower your risk substantially.

Coffeine is also negatively associated with alzheimer's. There are not just some correlational studies on this but mechanisms involved that might associate a causal link rather than just an association between coffeine and lowered AD risk.


It's good news to hear about the HDACs, so it likely it won't help the patients for which the disease has already started.
Are a so many stones in the way to actually bring such a drug on the market that it will take years and years.


This post was edited by YaC on May 15 2012 08:57am